Draft:Crankin Presents Time Travel Adventure

Crankin Presents Time Travel Adventure is an on-rail puzzle platforming video game for the PlayDate handheld gaming system. This game was developed by Uvula LLC, and was released digitally on April 26th, 2022. It is the fourth game included in the console's first season of games, which in turn is given to all PlayDate owners free of charge. All video games released as part of these seasons are published by Panic Inc., who is also the creator of the PlayDate.

In this game, the player controls the titular character Crankin as he travels through 50 levels. Each level consists of running forward and dodging various enemies in the name of meeting Crankette (Crankin's girlfriend) for their scheduled date. If the player runs into an enemy or arrives at the end of the stage too late, they then must restart the level. The player is given unlimited lives, so they are able to attempt each level freely. Crankin is a wind up robot who is controlled via the crank located on the right side of the PlayDate.

The game consists of 2 tempoaral dimensions. One consists of Crankin, and the other consists of Crankette, the enemies, and the in-game time displayed in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The crank moves Crankin's temporal dimension forwards and backwards by cranking forwards and backwards respectively. The enemies are able to move freely regardless of the player's actions, the in-game time automatically moves forward at 1 minute per second, and Crankette leaves if the in-game time reaches a time she considers unacceptably late.

This game is notable for being the first video game to be entirely controlled by a crank. The crank not only controls Crankin's temporal dimension, but also controls the cutscenes and navigates the title screen menu. The sound effects were handled by Matthew Grimm, the animation was handled by Ryan Mohler, the game was designed by Keita Takahashi, the game was programmed by Shaun Inman, and the music was handled by Cabel Sasser.

This game is also notable for featuring detailed 1-bit graphics. The PlayDate is only capable of playing 1-bit games, meaning there is only 1 digit of binary allocated to the colors it is able to display on its screen. The value 0 is given to the color black, and the value 1 is given to the color white. However, this game is also notable for using white outlines instead of the black outlines used traditionally, so the graphics could be considered inverted from standard practice.